


Bullet Time

by viridianmasquerade



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Computer Programming, Explosions, F/M, Hacking, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Red Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 08:32:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1503803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viridianmasquerade/pseuds/viridianmasquerade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Roxy likes best about Sollux is that he's always up to something. Especially when that something involves robot hacking and esoteric programming languages with stupid names.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bullet Time

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr user Kisbe asked me for a followup to Leetfilthy Hackerbabes, and here it is: the first sequel I've ever written. Enjoy.

The thing that Roxy liked most about Sollux is that he was always up to something.

It wasn't as though it was always something sneaky. He just couldn't sit still for more than five minutes at a stretch (if that), so he was pretty much always up to something. Coding, re-coding, heck, he'd even build whole esoteric programming languages like in his spare time just to see if he could. (It didn't always work out; his latest creation, :OSCOPY, had been an unmitigated disaster for reasons Roxy could barely articulate to Sollux through her horrified laughter.)

She liked to see how fast she could learn to out-code him in his own languages, and he liked to watch her do it. Ever since she'd spotted the wrongly-colored bracket in his ~ATH code the first time they'd met, she'd made a point of finding the tiniest errors in his programs, just to get his goat. Occasionally she suspected that he left them in there just for her to find, like a game or a gift: was she clever enough to spot his mistakes?  
  
Naturally.  
  
So as she sat down at the desk and pulled the husktop closer, the question on her lips this time wasn't whether or not she could find the errors in today's puzzle, but what the corrected code would do. A smirking Sollux sat next to her, his back to the desk, head turned to watch.  
  
"Shoo," she said, waving distractedly at him, "I gotta concentrate."  
  
"Hell no," he responded, "I want to see this shit go." He folded his arms expectantly.  
  
So it would affect something physical. Something in the meteor lab. Something visible from the desk.  
  
Roxy narrowed her eyes, scanning the room.

Sollux raised his eyebrows at her. "Anytime now, Ro-Lal." She liked the way he'd adopted Jane's affectionate nickname for her, to smooth over his irritation that he could not shorten her name to repeated letters the way he did with Karkat or Aradia.  
  
She rolled her eyes and looked at the lines of code on the screen. "•TIME? Really?" •TIME, pronounced 'bullet time,' was one of Sollux's earlier and more irritating esoteric languages. Coding anything in •TIME revolved entirely around taking one normally lightning-fast operation, slowing it down and executing it with as much dramatic preamble as possible. The best possible version of any given piece of •TIME code was packed to the brim with extensive background melodrama but still executed for the end-user as smoothly as if there'd been no mucking about at all.

This was extremely difficult for the coder and at best, entirely invisible to the end-user; it was purely an engine for the programmer to demonstrate their skills. It was exactly the kind of programming language an irrepressible show-off like Sollux would write.

Roxy tapped gently at the keyboard, frowning. This program, whatever it was, already seemed quite elegant. There was little need for correction at all. So why didn't it work as written?  
  
"Can't find it?" Sollux asked, after a few minutes passed in silence.  
  
She shooshed him irritably, then looked up. If she knew what the program was intended for, it might be easier to see what was wrong.  
  
But what would Sollux be up to?  
  
"Roxy," he said, jiggling his foot impatiently.  
  
"Stop trying to distract me," she said, and kept looking. Kanaya and Rose poring over books - no. Jake and Jade comparing guns - no. Dave, John, and Karkat bickering amiably in front of the television - maybe, but reprogramming a television wasn't anywhere close to showy enough to be worth the fuss. So who could he be trying to - there. She hadn't seen him before because he was at the very far end of the room from her (Sollux must have put the husktop here on purpose, she realized).   
  
"Dirk," she mused.  
  
Sollux shrugged elaborately, all elbows and innocence.  
  
"But why - oh," she realized, noticing that Dirk had a wrench in his hand. "Ohh," she repeated, grinning.  
  
Dirk was fond of claiming that his robots were uncrackable, impenetrable to the pithy code of mere software hackers like Roxy and Sollux. Roxy knew he was being at least semi-ironic, but she knew that arrogance on that level inevitably got under Sollux's skin. Like most phenomenally arrogant people, he found the trait insufferable in others.

She looked back down at the code, seeing it in a new light. "Hah," she muttered, and started typing. "You're trying to hack his fancy new robot," she said. "What are you trying to make it do, explode?" She pictured the scene and its aftermath in her mind - Dirk, uninjured (the Prince of Heart was far too cool to be injured by anything so mundane as a mere explosion) but eyebrows singed, leaning away bemusedly from a smoking crater that had formerly been full of slowly-exploding robot.  
  
"No," he said, "I am not trying to hack his stupid robot. I'm especially not doing the blowing shit up part."  
  
"Sollux, that is absolutely what you are doing!" she said, rolling her eyes without looking at him. She chewed her lip speculatively, then swapped two lines of code, still thinking intently about how cool the robot would look exploding.  
  
"Technically I would say that you are," he said, and naturally, the robot chose that particular moment to blow right the fuck up.  
  
This would have been attention-grabbing enough on its own. What was particularly fascinating about this particular explosion is that it appeared to be occurring entirely in slow motion: a blossoming of flame, rivets bulging and firing off like bullets, debris scattering so dramatically it appeared to be following a script.

Almost as though the entire explosion were operating in bullet time, which was, of course, impossible.

Sollux looked at Roxy. Roxy looked at Sollux.

"Well, fuck," they said, in perfect unison.

"You said you weren't trying to make it explode!" Roxy said, looking over at Dirk, along with everyone else in the lab. Fortunately he was unharmed (that coolness field, Roxy thought jealously). Far from looking singed and stunned, he was instead seizing the opportunity to walk away from the explosion without looking; standard operating practice for a high-ranking master of cool such as himself. Of course. If Trickster Mode hadn't shaken his demeanor, a little explosion wasn't about to.

"Don't look at me!" Sollux said, throwing his hands up defensively. "I didn't make it do that. •TIME doesn't make shit explode. What the ever-living fuck did you do to it?"

"Nothing! I pictured it in my head and thought it would be funny if - ooh. Hm." She stopped short in realization as Dirk made his way up to the desk, his ash-covered face looking somewhat worse for wear up close.

"And you thought it would be funny if what, exactly, Roxy?" he asked, his angular face a perfect visage of calm inquisitiveness, with the singular exception of - oh god - his singed and smoking eyebrows.

"If nothing," she squeaked, trying to stifle laughter. "Sollux did it. •TIME is his stupid invention. He wrote the code, I was just editing it! If something exploded, it's his fault." She couldn't do it. She just couldn't keep a straight face. Surely he must have known that. She choked down a snort and settled on a stupid-looking smushed-up grin. The corners of her mouth kept twitching.

Sollux had collapsed in silent hysterics beside her, gasping for breath, unable to even protest her feeble attempt to throw him under the bus.

Dirk raised one smoking eyebrow, and with a gravitas far in excess of the legal limit for a young man of his age, reached up and removed his glasses, revealing two perfectly outlined triangles of unblemished skin around his eyes. It was too much to bear. He must have been aware of what he looked like, and watching him pretend with utter conviction that everything was perfectly normal was just too much for Roxy to contain herself.

"Okay, okay, I did it," she choked through her giggles, "It was me. I made the robot explode with void powers by accident. I didn't mean to! I must have swiped the nothingness right out of it without even trying. Oh, my god, Dirk, your face! You look like a cartoon character."

He gave her what can only be described as a Lengthy And Significant Look, which did nothing to stifle her laughter.

Exasperated, he turned to glare at Sollux, who had recovered enough to start breathing normally again.

"Don't look at me," he said, smirk levels cranked to eleven, "•TIME is basically a bullshit language for assholes, it's not supposed to actually accomplish anything that useful, no matter what you write."

"Ha!" Roxy said. "So you admit it."

Dirk raised his other eyebrow skeptically and waited.   
  
"Okay, okay, it was supposed to make the robot sing," Sollux said, unable to resist the urge to brag.

Silence, punctuated with giggles.

"And dance."

More of the same.

"You shouldn't have said your robots were unhackable," Sollux said, and shrugged.

"You didn't hack them. She used her void powers," Dirk said stiffly. "They're still totally fucking unhackable." He turned on his heel and stalked away, head held high, eyebrows still smoking.

Sollux and Roxy politely waited until he was at a reasonable distance, then high-fived, collapsing into giggles.

"I'll un-void him a new one later," she said, “it'll be fine.”

"Are you going to accidentally leave out the encryption he says makes them so unhackable?"

"Are you ever not up to something?" Roxy asked, grinning.

"Nope, and you love it," he said, smiling right back at her.


End file.
